Monday, February 28, 2011

Ok, to recap - I'm on board with the pro-choice stuff, but I wish the bumper-stickers and catch phrases I usually see associated with it were intelligible to outsiders.

I say this because I wasn't always pro-choice. Back in the days before before my 20s, the bumper sticker slogans and favorite rallying cries of the pro-choice movement failed so badly to address the arguments of the pro-life side that I assumed that the movement was the domain of a coven of heartless, thoughtless, sadistic harpies, and that the entire camp didn't have a leg to stand on. My previous entry takes on what one would think would be central to the debate - namely, "what is a fetus and what significance, if any, should it be accorded as a human being?" Strangely, this issue is more or less avoided entirely in the majority of pro-choice posts and comments I've seen about the topic, though the same certainly can't be said about the pro-life side.

For example, "Don't like abortion? Then don't have one." I wonder if they'd allow themselves to be caught applying the same reasoning to child molestation - I would hope not. If the only argument out there were of this "it's none of your business" sort, then I probably never would have changed my mind. "My body, my choice" is slightly better in that it at least touches on part of the actual reasoning someone might have, but being to a large extent another "mind your own business" argument, it again falls fall short of addressing the primary immediate concern of the pro-lifers - that is, what an abortion actually is. Before I rethought my positions, I was more or less offended by what I saw as willful obliviousness to this - to me, it seemed like "my body, my choice" equated having to carry a baby to term with having to get a boob job - something that no one would ever think to make women do for any reasons other than malevolent ones. And if someone insists that it's about the status of a human life, often one that was created in a mutually willful act? Then it's offensive that they insist on bringing it up, and it's obvious that what they *really* want is mandatory boob jobs, and you obviously don't think the father should be held accountable either, and how dare you, QED. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that this was my entire exposure to pro-choice argumentation throughout the first 20 years of my life.

It is true that I vastly underestimated the burden entailed by having kids, and that I didn't have a wonderful plan for how to pick up the adoption slack in an economically sustainable way, and that I more or less didn't expect any of it to ever affect me outside of the abstract. For a while, I was in that "cases X and Y are unfortunate, but..." camp before reconsidering the status of the fetus itself. But all of this is something I learned to appreciate from reading more thoughtful and reasoned accounts on the internet later on in my college years, not something that was ever clearly explained in sound bytes, slogans, bumper stickers, posters, etc. It also didn't help that most of what I heard was picked out by our pastor and preached against, to be used as a strawman, but then what I actually ran into in the wild matched it fairly well. To be fair, the better pro-choice arguments are rather nuanced, and I was a middle schooler, and so were the people who would have argued with me; my teachers probably would not have had much to gain in the way of job security by attempting to present us with carefully-reasoned arguments to the contrary.

Now I'd like to talk about I used to be a pro-life Republican. My initial reaction to this essay was very negative, but on a second read, I calmed down a little and merely felt a bit mixed about it. The reason is that I had a somewhat high and fairly specific expectation for it, and this expectation was not met. My expectations for an essay with the title "I used to be a pro-life Republican" takes the form of a thought experiment: I should expect nothing less than whatever it was that it would have taken to convince a younger Andrea to change her mind on the topic, or, more realistically, get her to stop for a minute and really think about something she hadn't considered before. I think that this is more or less what such an essay should aim for. It is indeed a high mark, but I think it's important to shoot for it. Not everyone can see into the mind of a young pro-life Republican simply by thinking back to high school, but Andrea can, and I can. I wanted her to convince herself, but I don't think she did. I could be wrong, but based on my limited information about her, I doubt it. I'm fairly confident that I wouldn't have changed my mind, though.

Suddenly: I was the dirty, filthy slut. I was the horny bitch. I was the callous murderer-in-training. What, did I think my womb was going to grow a toaster if we had a condom mishap?

Of course not. I didn’t think babies were toasters and I didn’t believe I was going to birth a toaster if I got pregnant, so how had I managed to belittle women for years with this condescending, patronizing line about a small kitchen appliance? I was frozen in a kind of moral limbo–I couldn’t believe I found myself simultaneously relieved that I could access an abortion if I wanted to, and saddened and stressed out by the possibility of having to make that decision.

What did she think, then? I don't know. As far as I can tell, she was expecting a toaster. What answer does Andrea Present have for Andrea Past? "I KNEW it wouldn't be a toaster! I'm not dumb! Stop belittling and patronizing me!"? What would Past Andrea have answered to that - "sweet Christ Jesus almighty, you're right! I was being a bit of a tosspot"?

Today, I see that nothing about my religious anti-choice views did anything to prevent abortion. They did a lot to shame myself and my friends, but nothing to prevent abortion. Today, I hear anti-choicers talk about the babies and the unborn and the American genocide, but what I really hear beneath all that is slut-shaming and fear of female sexuality. I hear that language clearly because I spoke it once, myself. It is a familiar language to me.

Is it really so 100% clear-cut? If she really had no concern for the unborn, then why would she be "saddened and stressed out by the possibility of having to make that decision"? Perhaps the stress and sadness is nothing more than embarrassment at the prospect of being exposed as a hypocrite; I doubt it, though, and I would like to give her more credit than that. I agree that slut-shaming is problematic, gratuitous, unnecessary. But the same people who have the capacity for great callousness toward moral trespasses also have the capacity for empathy. We rage when we think we see idiocy, we grin when we fondle our significant others, and we cringe at the specter of death. I think the "sonogram bill" writers are wrongheaded, but I don't think I could dismiss them as insincere. Nor do I think Past Andrea was insincere, either, though "condescending" and "callous" could be fair assessments, and I similarly regret similar attitudes I had at the time. I wasn't consciously co-conspiring with a sophist's alibi, though - I was mean and nasty, but I believed that there was a reason that "baby-killing harpy-sluts" should be ashamed. My previous entry touches to some extent on how I came to think otherwise.

On a brighter note, this remark in particular may have had some chance of convincing Past Andrea to support contraception and education, if not abortion:

I know that what has kept me from having to make a decision about an unintended pregnancy is not the prospect of hearing a fetal heartbeat or having to go through a 24-hour wait period, but safe, easy and affordable access to contraception and good, honest medical information disseminated by doctors and medical professionals

If both sides agree that less demand for abortions is a step in the right direction, then there you have it; from reading bumper stickers and so on, I had no idea that this was the case when I was a zit-faced pro-life Republican teenager. But one task remains, in that case: we need to convince teenagers that it's even desirable to encourage or enable non-procreational sexual activity in the first place; this might be somewhat self-evident to a lot of us older and more liberal folks, but this is also one of those things that is probably quite difficult to explain to a conservative-minded teenage abstinence warrior in terms that they would "get". This is a somewhat tangential can of worms, but perhaps I should get into that someday. Whatever sex is, it's nigh-irresistible, or at the least just barely good enough to gamble on making a fetus to get it. The human life cycle really is something.

Maybe everything is futile and there's no hope of getting anyone to understand anything except in retrospect, but if that's the case, perhaps that's a lesson I'll have to come to understand in retrospect, myself. But I'd like to think it's not futile to share what you're really thinking with people sooner than you came to think that way yourself. I haven't given up on Past Watt just yet.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

An alarming amount of talking past each other usually occurs when people with differing viewpoints talk about abortion. While I generally identify as pro-choice, I'd like to cite a couple examples of people who either don't speak for me, or people who are doing a very bad job of attempting to speak for me. People I generally respect and agree with on many things have been promoting both of these lately, and it just doesn't sit right with me.

The first is Anthony Weiner's recent tirade against the infamous distinction between rape and "forcible rape" that was to be added to the Hyde amendment.

There's quite a bit to go through here. Let me start with what they have in common before I give my own views, and then I'll return to the samples in part 2.

Neither of these leftists can be bothered to condescend to even begin to answer the question of what they think a zygote/blastocyst/embryo/fetus is, and what significance, if any, they think it should be accorded, or why. In any case, I've more or less found it somewhat pointless to try to talk about these basic underlying issues, even with people whose conclusions I mostly agree with. In forums or wherever, I often get the feeling that I'm harshing everyone's trip just by being male and having any interest in the topic that takes any form other than rabidly agreeing with the "self-evident" axiom that a fetus is whatever its mother says it is and that all further thinking on the subject should only be done by her explicit invitation. Actually, even stating the axiom out loud in those words is going too far to draw attention to the question of what a fetus is, for some tastes. I get the feeling that maybe 10% of the left has any interest in actually addressing the question, whereas the other 90% are insulted that anyone would think to ask it.

What happens in between falls on some sort of continuum, and though I am not intimately familiar with the particulars, I would certainly feel differently about a later stage of a pregnancy compared to an earlier one, and without question, I would prefer all abortions to that do happen to happen sooner rather than later, all other things being equal. While a second- or third- trimester fetus has many features that make it closer than ever before to self-awareness and humanity, what isn't so clear to me is the extent to which it has earned a status greater than that of a pig, cow, or chicken. The pig, especially, I would expect to be much more capable of contemplating its own misery, fear, and pain as it is killed. It is anything but clear to me why this capacity for experiencing what is happening to it should be given so much less weight.

Only by acknowledging a continuum and a strong disanalogy between toddlers and fetuses is it possible to proceed. I would think that pro-choice persons would generally have some interest in establishing this disanalogy as well as they can manage to explain it, but it's not the first time I've been surprised and disappointed. (I suppose it would be an interesting philosophical dilemma if a Horton Hears A Who micro-universe were living inside of my brain tumor and I had to decide whether to operate, but that is neither here nor there.)

(From Wikipedia. The far-left bar is misleadingly wide; heights have NOT been adjusted so that the AREA is proportional to the abortion rate. The HEIGHT times 1000 is the number of abortions per year in the entire range of development.)

I am pro-choice, and I am not a vegetarian. To me, it seems not at all coincidental that PETA ads resemble pro-life ads so closely, and this reason can be discerned at least dimly even without a more-than-passing interest in biology. I am not lacking in all ability to empathize in either case, and I would probably be a little unsettled by having to watch a butchery or an abortion being performed, probably to about equal degrees. The horror of death by chopping, shredding, and puncturing is a somewhat prominent feature of the natural world, though, and one that is beyond our means to eliminate, except perhaps by complete annihilation of all life on the entire planet. If the goal is to minimize suffering, then, the best one can do is precisely that; depending on how one regards livestock, one may be right to have concern for how they're handled. A field mouse caught in the maw of a cat may be mutilated and allowed to die slowly, but livestock and pets are under our own watch, and we may find some merit in the idea of allowing their lives and deaths to be of similar duration and quality as they may have been otherwise, even while we use them toward our own ends.

The other issue I'd like to address is the issue of potential life, perhaps the weakest of all common pro-life arguments. Potential life is unbelievably cheap - any time any potent man fails to impregnate any fertile woman for any reason whatsoever, potential life is lost - each of the millions of sperm that may have paired with one of thousands of eggs marks one of literally billions of lost potential lives - and that is for just one man and one woman; multiplying this again by a billion for the number of men and again by a billion for the number of women, and one sees a vast landscape of lost potential, though I don't intend to lose sleep over it, and neither should you. If my mother had ovulated a different egg 28 years ago rather than the one she did, someone else would be writing a different blog post about something else, and no one would have noticed any difference, other than perhaps in the abstract as I am doing now. Saving sex for marriage isn't the murder of potential life. Refusing to have unprotected sex with the first man to come on to you in a bar isn't the murder of potential life. Stopping at just one wife isn't the murder of potential life. And - at the risk of being controversial - I would go so far as to say that the use of condoms is not the murder of potential life.

The difference, then, between abstinence and abortion is not potential life - the difference is entirely contained in however many weeks constitute the life and death of the fetus, and in whatever regrets the mother may or may not experience afterward. When someone says, "I'm glad my parents didn't abort me," I have to wonder how they'd feel about saying instead, "I'm glad the two or three blastocysts before me didn't implant." I hope that such people don't want everyone to make as many humans as possible - that would be a scary thought, but the logical end to which to take this exercise in avoiding losses in potential life.

That, roughly, is why I am in favor of legalized and subsidized abortion.

But before I go on, it should be noted that, without any exceptions I know of, even the most vocal proponents don't particularly want to be involved in one for its own sake. If abortion is orders of magnitude cheaper and less life-changing than childbirth, then consistent use of contraception is several more orders of magnitude better still. Just judging by the estimated costs to the welfare system alone, helping all women avoid unplanned pregnancies is a strikingly effective investment by any conceivable estimate, even if the quality of life of these women is of no concern to you. For my part, I'm concerned about both, and am duly horrified to see Planned Parenthood funding on the chopping block.

I firmly believe that proper education, subsidies, and screenings can, indeed make "safe, legal, and rare" a thoroughly sane approach to abortion. This slogan of Bill Clinton is not a contradiction, but a summary referring to several interacting parts of a general plan. Abortion is not made rare by being made safe and legal - it is only by enabling as many women as possible to have only those pregnancies which are intentional in the first place that abortion can be rare. When it is beyond a certain natural base level, incidence of abortion could be regarded as a barometer for coercion, misinformation, and poorly distributed resources. Criminalizing abortion would not solve these other problems, but solving these other problems could only decrease the incidence of abortion.

In Part 2, I will compare my own reasoning and what convinced me to switch over with what is typically presented in a discussion.